Baptist churches, with all their
rights, have no right to be inconsistent, nor to favor a practice
unwarranted by the Word of God, and productive of evils. Under the
inflexible law of "usage," which compels the pastor to invite
"all members of sister churches present" to the Lord?s Supper, the
following inconsistencies and evils, exceedingly prejudicial to our
denominational influence and growth, are practiced and fostered.

1. Baptist Churches that practice
intercommunion have practically no communion of their own. They have church
members, church conferences, church discipline, but no church communion; and,
therefore, no scripturally observed Lord?s Supper, and, therefore, none at
all, as I have shown in Chapter VII. The communion of such churches is denominational,
and not churchcommunion.

2. Baptist Churches that practice
intercommunion have no guardianship over the Lords Supper, which is divinely
enjoined upon them to exercise. They have control of their own members to
exclude them from the table if unworthy, but none whatever of others more
unworthy who may come. Such churches can exclude heretics, drunkards, revelers,
and "every one that walketh disorderly" from their membership, that
they may not defile the feast; but they cannot protect the table from such so
long as they do not limit it to their membership.

3. There are Baptist Churches
that exclude from their own membership all drunkards, theater-goers, dancers,
horse-racers, and visitors of the race-course, because they cannot fellowship
such practices as Godly walking or becoming a Christian, and therefore believe
that they are commanded to purge the feast of all such characters as leaven,
and, yet, by the invitation to the members of all other Baptist Churches, they
receive the very same characters to their table every time they spread it.

ILLUSTRATION 1.?The church at
C??excluded a member for "general hard drinking and occasional
drunkenness," because she could not eat with such. He united with the
church at W??the next month, for he was wealthy and family influential; and
on the next communion at C??he accepted the urgent invitation of courtesy,
and sat down by the side of the brother who preferred the charge of drunkenness
against him.

ILLUSTRATION 2.?The church at
M??excluded two members on the charge of adultery, for marrying contrary to
the law of Christ; the one having a living wife, and the other a living husband;
they had both been legally divorced, not for the one cause specified, but it was
generally believed that they deserted their respective companions that they
might obtain an excuse for marrying. Three months after they both united with a
church ten miles distant, and now never fail to accept the affectionate
invitations of the former church to commune with it.

4. There are multitudes?I
rejoice to say nearly all our Southern churches outside the cities?who will
not receive persons immersed by Catholics or Campbellites, Protestants or
Mormons, because they do not regard them as baptized at all; yet by their open
denominational invitations they receive all such?and there are many of them in
the churches?to their table, as duly qualified.

ILLUSTRATION 1.?The church at
S??refused to receive two Campbellites on their baptism. They offered
themselves to the Sixth Street church, which received alien immersions, and
whose pastor was an immersed Campbellite; were received, and they made it a
point to accept the very pressing invitation of the church at L??to commune
with it.

ILLUSTRATION 2. ?The church at
H??has several members received on their Mormon immersions. Her sister
church at P??repudiates such immersions as null and void, yet these very
members never fail to accept her liberal denominational invitations. From
principal and solemn duty she forbids all such as her members, but from courtesy
invites all such, as foreigners, to commune with her.

CONSISTENCY.?If each Baptist
Church had its own communion, with its own members, independent of all others,
then each church could receive into membership, or exclude from membership,
whoever it pleased, and no other church or communion be injured by it. On the
one hand, the church excluding a person would have no power to prevent his
uniting with another church made up of members no better than himself; and, on
the other hand, the church receiving the excluded person would not, in so doing,
restore him to the communion from which he had been cast out.

The
evils of denominational communion

1. It opens the door to the table
to all the ministerial impostors that pervade the land. They have repeatedly
started from Maine or Canada, and "gone through" all our churches to
the Southern Gulf and the Pacific Coast, and they can usually be traced back to
the place whence they came by a grass-widow left in "perplexity" every
one hundred fifty, or two hundred miles on the "back tract." These
impostors hold "revival meetings" until all their borrowed sermons are
exhausted, and make it a point to do all the baptizing, and have the weakness of
some other ministers to keep a record of the number of their baptisms. It is
needless to say that the church is often divided by their influence, and left in
confusion and disgrace when they are exposed. California can witness to the
evils resulting from these characters.

The remedy is, let no strange
traveling preacher be admitted to the table as a participant, nor into our
pulpits, until the church has written back and learned that he is in all
respects worthy.

2. Denominational communion never
has been sustained, and never can be, but at the expense of peace. It has always
been the occasion of discord among brethren. It has alienated churches one from
the other. It has distracted and divided associations, and all for the very good
reason that it is departure from the simplicity that is in Christ.

3. It has encouraged tens of
thousands of Baptists, on moving away from the churches to which they belong, to
go without transferring their membership to a church where they are going, as
they could have the church privileges?preaching and COMMUNION?without
uniting with, and bearing the churches burdens. Nor has it stopped here. It has
done more in this way to multiply backsliders and apostates all over the country
than any other one thing that can be named. If Baptists could have no such
privileges without membership, they would keep their membership with them and
enjoy it.

4. To this evil may be traced
four out of five, if not nine out of ten, of all the councils called to settle
difficulties between churches during the last twenty-five years. The
difficulties have in one form or another, grown out of this practice, and would
not have been, had our churches observed only church communion.

5. All the scandal heaped upon us
as "close communion Baptists" with much of the prejudice produced in
the public mind and fostered against us, has come from our denominational
communion. Had our churches severely limited their communion as they have their
discipline, to their own members, we should no more have heard of "close
communion Baptists" then we now do of "close-membership
Baptists," or "close-discipline Baptists."

6. We annually lose thousands and
tens of thousands of worthy persons who would have united with us, but for what
they understand as our unwarranted close-communion. Our practice can never be
satisfactorily explained to them as consistent, so long as we practice a
partial, and not a general, open communion. Our denominational growth is very
materially retarded by our present inconsistent practice of intercommunion. If
we practiced strict church communion, these, and all Christians, could
understand the matter at once; and no one would presume to blame us for not
inviting members of other denominations to our table, when we refuse, from
principal, to invite members of other Baptist churches?our own brethren.

7. It is freely admitted by
reliable brethren who enjoy the widest outlook over the denomination in America,
that for the last few decades of years the general drift has been, and now is,
setting towards "open communion"?it is boasted of as a
"broadening liberalism." There are numbers in all our churches?and
the number is increasing, especially in our fashionable city and wealthy town
churches?who are impatient of the present restrictions imposed upon the table;
because, not being able to divide a principle, they are not able to see the
consistency of inviting members of sister churches, and rejecting those whom we
admit to be evangelical churches, as though all evangelical churches are not
sister; nor can they divine why Pedobaptists ministers are authorized to preach
the gospel and to immerse; are invited to occupy our pulpits, and even to serve
our churches as supply pastors for a season?all their ministrations recognized
as valid, and yet there are debarred from our table. They work for us, and we
refuse to allow them to eat. The only ground upon which we can successfully meet
and counteract the liberalizing influences, which are gently bearing the
Baptists of America into the slough of open communion, is strict local church
communion, and the firm and energetic setting forth of the "Old Baptist
Landmarks" advocated in this little book.

We have had assurances of the
correctness of the statement from many of the standard men in our denomination.

In the last conversation had with
the late Brother Poindexter, of Virginia, he freely expressed himself in
substantially these words:

"You are aware that I have
not fully endorsed all your positions known as Old Landmarkism, but I wish you
to know my present convictions for your encouragement. I have carefully examined
all the arguments, pro and con, and watched the tendency of things the last 20
years, and I am prepared to say that I am convinced that what you call "Old
Landmarkism" constitutes the only bulwark to break the increasing tide of
modern "liberalism,"?which is nothing but open communion?that
threatens to obliterate every vestige of Bible ecclesiasticism from the earth.
Though my sympathies, and feelings, and practice, often, have been upon the
liberal side, yet I am convinced that Baptists, if they long maintain their
denominational existence, must stand squarely with you upon these
principles."

Brother J. P. Boyce, the
distinguished president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,
Louisville, KY., publicly declared on the floor of the Mississippi Baptist state
convention, at Jackson, Miss., 1876, what he had before stated to us
privately?that he was a Landmark Baptist.

He has openly proclaimed to the
world his repudiation of "alien immersions" by immersing, in 1879,
Brother Weaver, pastor of a Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. Brother Weaver,
twenty years before, had been received into a Baptist Church on the Methodist
immersion.